Shelters to Shutters

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Model & Strategy

Over the course of each year, 2.4 million Americans will experience “situational homelessness.” These are individuals who have been in the workforce and have marketable skills, but due to a life-altering but largely addressable event—job loss, medical issues, domestic violence, or a natural disaster—they are now living without a home. This is different from chronic homelessness, which is where the bulk of private and public resources are directed in the United States. There is an opportunity to address the needs of an existing institutional system to solve the situational homelessness problem: the private multi-family housing industry. With a 33% annual turnover rate and thousands of job openings per-month in most markets, the multi-family property management industry faces a major employee hiring and retention problem.

Shelters to Shutters (S2S) is on a mission to transition individuals and their families out of situational homelessness to economic self-sufficiency by providing full-time employment, housing, and career training in partnership with the real estate industry. Specifically, Shelters to Shutters offers an innovative, scalable, and cost-effective solution by partnering with multi-family property owners and operators, as well as community nonprofits, to identify, assess, and place people facing situationally homelessness in onsite, entry-level jobs, and provide them with furnished housing to fundamentally transform their and their families’ lives. S2S relies on trusted, local non-profit partners to refer individuals at risk of or already experiencing situational homelessness, thereby both meeting the housing insecure where they are and leveraging partners’ expertise to pre-qualify candidates most apt to succeed in the program. S2S then provides each participant with career mentoring, technical training, financial literacy, and access to support services to ensure a successful long-term transition and economic self-sufficiency, while providing a pipeline of high quality, motivated employees for the multifamily housing industry.

At a Glance
Founded: 2014
President and CEO: David Williams
Economic Empowerment
Location of work: Domestic
www.shelterstoshutters.org
Shelters to Shutters
Vienna, VA
Homelessness is a circumstance, not an identity.
Meet David Williams

In early 2021, David Williams was hired as President and CEO of Shelters to Shutters for his nearly 40 years of experience growing national nonprofits in local markets. David helped start the Houston Food Bank, led Habitat for Humanity International as COO, and Make-A-Wish America as CEO.

After reading an article profiling homelessness in Asheville, NC, the idea for Shelters to Shutters (S2S) was born. Chris Finlay, an owner and operator of a multifamily company was struck by the number of people referenced in the article who really wanted to get back to work, but without a home address to put on a job application they struggled to get hired or seen. Without a job, it’s hard to get an address and without an address it’s hard to get a job. How do you break this cycle? It became clear to him that the apartment industry in which he had spent his career could offer a powerful solution to this dilemma.

Under David’s leadership, S2S began operating a new model with national support for dedicated local staff and programming, providing better access and more opportunities for clients. His vision is to expand the program to 25 markets by 2025.

Impact

To date, S2S’s program has assisted just over 470 individuals and family members out of homelessness to economic self-sufficiency.

72% of people in the program qualified for a wage increase or promotion after their first year of employment.

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